Subchronic Oral and Inhalation Toxicities: a Challenging Attempt for Modeling and Prediction.

The article deals with a challenging attempt to model and predict "difficult" properties as long-term subchronic oral and inhalation toxicities (90 days) using nonlinear QSAR approach. This investigation is one of the first to tackle such multicomplex properties where we have employed nonlinear models based on artificial neural network for the prediction of NOAEL (no observable adverse effect level). Despite the complex nature of the NOAEL property based on in vivo rat experiments, the successful models can be used as alternative tools to non-animal tests for the initial assessment of these chronic toxicities. The model for oral subchronic toxicity is able to describe 88 %, and the inhalation model 87 % of the statistical variance. For the sake of future predictions, we have also defined in a quantitative way the applicability domain of all neural network models.